I'm not sick. You're imagining that my voice is different. It's the same as always. Hope you enjoy the video, and if you like and subscribe I promise I'll love you forever!
i do have one important question, why do you have so much faith in Obsidian when they are no longer the same people running the company? it's almost like you believe they are the same Obsidian who made FONV when it's been roughly 15 years since then, especially considering their last game was the outer worlds, it wasn't much better than Bethesda's starfield sadly, hell it was even worse than their own FONV. so i ask again, why do you have such faith in Obsidian when they aren't even the same company anymore and their content hasn't improved all that much in all that time? in many ways it seems like they try to mimic bethesda but on a smaller scale, but their writing isn't that much better, so what do you hope to accomplish at the end of the day?
now i personally liked the voiced protagonist in FO4 and wish bethesda would keep it up with that trend like all other normal games that do the whole RPG thing, but the community is full of morons sometimes who like the silent protagonist and now we have starfield and many saying that among many other bad designs is indeed a bad design. they would have been better providing it anyway but allowing all the special people who didn't like it to turn it off as a built in feature to the game. that way they could please all parties who play the game, but i swear the people who complained about one thing in the form for another feature to be stripped away only held bethesda back with their stupid demands that have made Bethesda's games worse, like a bunch of people wanted not only the non voiced player but they also wanted the stupid Oblivion camera that really gets up close and personal, what is the point in character creation if you never see your face, this is the same criticisms that cyberpunk had at launch, why you never see yourself in 2nd person during conversations, so why character creation if you never see your character? it's because stupid people with stupid decision making skills bully bethesda into doing stupid things, i mean they make some stupid decisions on their own for sure, but much of that stupidity comes from the stupid community who demand for stupid things. just when you thought bethesda might improve in their later games they allow stupid people with stupid ideas run the show, no advancing into the future for their games because the fans want things to be exactly like Morrowind, well thanks a lot boomers for your stupid ideas to restrict progress in bethesda games.
now i'm not against payed mods so long as the pricing is right for all parties involved, when someone releases an armor mod for something like 8 bucks is way too much and should never be considered in that system and should always offer much more. the way bethesda currently has it set up is not that great and ultimately bethesda sets the price because bethesda are greedy motherfuckers and tend to not understand how to properly price balance anything even in their games at times. they know they wouldn't be here without the modding scene, so they offer this idea of the creation club or creations whatever they want to call it now, the point is it's a market provided to the modders if they choose to use that system, but it really needs to be further implemented to fit all parties desires so it doesn't feel too greedy, i think they would be much better off doing a subscription system for the mods instead of making each and every user pay out the ass for creation or creations content, that will ease up on the idea of it being too scum like which right now it often feels like that due to some mods being released for that much money for little to nothing in said mod as the result.
i think the start screen thing was really stupid lol, like most people hate the start screen and just want to get passed it as fast as possible, one of my favorite mods makes FO4's main screen blank and black and clean as i wait for it to load the load screen, i wish there was only one load screen but the front screen for some reason also counts as a load screen. so i pretty much go through "2 separate load screens" at the beginning, before i can play my game, and that's every bethesda game since the beginning of time lol.
That brief mention of foreshadowing got a laugh out of me. Well done. I used to be an adventurer like you, but if I go back to Starfield, it'll only be because I foolishly pre-paid for the first expansion. Starfield did make me realize I was in an abusive relationship with my favourite game dev. But my eyes are open now, and they are sleeping on the couch, and I remind them every morning that it's time they got their own place again.
I definitely hit that point with FO76. Never again will I buy a bethesda product. At least some of the studios under them might produce something good, looking at you ID.
I watched reviews and gameplay for starfield and decided it wasn’t worth it. It just looks so bland and boring. More people are playing Skyrim today, I am one of them.
Bethesda was building their vision of the PS5 dev kit, nowonder they were trying to make it PS5 exclusive, so they dont need to cut down on the vision due to the Series S limitations.. .. no wonder Bethesda didn't give a f ck anymore, after Xbox forced them on the Series S (and lied to them..) ... F76 & other bad decisions were forced on Bethesda by Zenimax.., and now Xbox
Because there are always those morons that buy that trash without thinking. Just look at that crap star citizen. 3D assets (space ships) costing $15.000 and idiots buy that. You could get a REAL thing for that cash, like a nice car. Instead of some in-game trash
You didn't mention a big part of Oblivion that foreshadowed Bethesda's laziness. In Morrowind, the Khajit had cat feet, where their ankles were near the middle of where human shins would be and they walked on their toes rather than the soles of their feet. But in Oblivion, they gave the Khajit regular human feet and said it would be too much work to give them a different walking animation instead of just copy pasting the generic human walk 😢😢😢😢
It is also when they lost their creative spark. Morrowind has strange alien architecture, egg mines, nyx hounds etc. Cyrodil lost its jungles, and became a Lord of the Rings ripoff. The architecture, oblivion is just mordor, the wildlife is generic and the magic of the setting was largely lost.
cyrodil was also supposed to be _deeply_ unique. it was originally a chinese styled empire built on a series of rivers in an untamed jungle with dragons roaming the land.
I remember the backlash on forums over the Horse Armor was nuts, and the community seemed adamantly against it. In World of Warcraft, when the cosmetic helmets came out, people were getting votekicked in dungeons immediately for wearing them and the forums were aflame of people who bought them arguing against people who were retaliating. It was a few years ago I was working on a remote jobsite with a bunch of guys I would refer to as "non-gamers". Big into sports, drinking, all that. But they all followed the same pattern - they bought the newest Playstation or XBox model, and bought FIFA, and Call of Duty every single release. They barely touched them, but it was like a pattern, a tribalistic team-based belief system. And they also all played this one zombie game on their phones, and were funnelling cash into it daily for more items, stamina, and all that garbage. I'd seen all the graphs and news articles about casual gamers being so prominent, but this was the first time I really saw how much these guys funnel into the industry. The conversation had come up because I had mentioned I bought a new, expensive laptop for my out of town jobs and they were like "WHAAAAAT, you spent HOW MUCH?!", and I was curious on how much we'd each spent on gaming. Turns out, myself, the guy with a World of Warcraft account since release, an active FF14 account for ~2 years, a gaming PC, gaming desktop, plus peripherals, had spent less over ~20 years than these guys who had ~10 years. One of the dudes had event spent about $2500 on this stupid zombie game in less than a year. I wonder how many of them would have, or did buy fucking Horse Armor.
That's addiction, bro. These games are pushing peoples buttons. So many people think they're not being manipulated or they're smart or immune to propaganda, but then I see the numbers from some of these gacha games and its like... yall aren't even thinking, like fat people who snack all day, they don't notice until its too late.
@@haydentravis3348 And it ruins it for the rest of us. We have Bethesda and the Paid Mod Fiasco, garbage titles like 76, Starfield, Diablo 3/4, and massive ingame MMO shops because these idiots who don't even play their games will funnel cash in like mad.
The biggest problem is undoubtedly the simplification in both mechanics and lore. Ability Scores? Gone. Casting Spells while wielding a weapon? Gone. The world, both mundane and eccentric at the same time? Almost gone. Morally grey Characters on all sides? Gone. It just sucks. They killed both the body and soul of their games.
Fallout 3's morality is infamously a joke. Nuke innocents for no reason, or don't. Genocide the wasteland, or not. Sacrifice yourself for no reason, don't.
@@Duchess_Van_Hoofwhen I first blew up Megaton and flooded Tennypenny Tower with ghouls I was expecting so much backlash as I progressed but literally you just get your dad saying "I am disappoint" and that's it. No one fucking cares except maybe Jericho who likes your evil, but theres not even a special relationship there.
@@geordiejones5618 Whats even worse is FO3 Dad only cares about Megaton and its fate; does not care if you burned Harold or shoot up Rivet City, or anything. A common comment I see on that relationship is the same one from FO4, there is supposed to be a parental relationship which is hinted towards but never is established beyond "Hello Blood Relative!" in either case. 4 is kind of forgivable, the baby you knew ain't what you find, but three is not as you have tons of time where you and your father should be spending time. It's something that aggravates me to this day. Bad writing.
In Fallout 3, I got totally lost in the creepy subway tunnels under a ruined city. It was super dark and kinda scary, with weird noises and stuff all around. I was trying to find a way out, but it was like a maze down there. My pipboy flashlight didn’t help much in the green tint. While wandering around, I thought about my old life before all this craziness. I was like you once, an adventurer. But then I got hit in the knee with an arrow in a fight, and everything changed except war because that never changes. Now, here I was, lost in this spooky underground, just trying to find my way back. Like Bethesda after Starfield.
I've been play Bethesda games for 20 years and it's time for the top management to be replaced. I have zero expectations for future releases. I only played Starfield on gamepass and can't bring myself to play FO76. Edit: If Obsidian ever gets another FO shot they have to get the old team back together many are not at the studio. Josh Sawyer being one that HAS to be part of it.
Sadly, a big change must happen in Bethesda to have another Fallout game done by Obisidian, because the higher-ups at Bethesda rejected their proposal to this and to do spin-off TES games according to a tweet from Chris Avellone.
One of FO4s big problems was the dialog system. The purpose of dialog choices in RPGs is to give the player control over the narrative. But most of the time BGS has ALREADY decided for you during critical story beats with dialog options that basically amount to: 1) YES 2) ALSO YES 3) MAYBE 4) SURE
You forgot the best part about the FO1st controversy: someone bought out the web domain for Fallout First to rightfully dump on it, before Bethesda could. The website is still online as of 1/2024.
Also when they finally responded to a looming class-action lawsuit for the Duffel kerfuffle, they made a website for the dissatisfied people to apply for, but it somehow unintentionally leaked their private info.
oblivion and fallout 3 is really when the change started. The shift from complex character skill systems, to a design philosophy with simplification as the focus. That was the biggest change imo. They still have this simplification mindset today.
I agree but i think the proper way of saying it:"they keep setting bar lower and lower". I dont actually think that when it comes to writing or combat the older games were any good, but it feels more like they are not even giving much of a crap anymore. Just because Starfield, Fallout 4 meets the quality of your average AAA game, that does not mean that the bar is highly placed, infact as i said i think its going lower and lower and features treated as in "we need this feature" as if it was a checkbox not as in "this feature is fundamental to the game and we will balance the game around it"
@@Spaceconstructs At what point did I use the word downfall? I used the word "change." If you have not played fo1, fo2, daggerfall, or morrowind, it will be difficult to see this major change in complexity, so make sure you play them. Otherwise, I'd say if you've played all their other games, and you still think fo3 and oblivion were the best.... i have no words.
Every game from Oblivion onwards removed neat and interesting features with no rhyme or reason. Elder Scrolls classes, intricate quest chains, damage threshold, a coherent narrative, narrative player agency, magic schools etc etc
Morrowind was my first taste of the Elder Scrolls world. After the intro sections, and you're let loose in the village of Seyda Neen, and the pop-up info window says, "you are on your own now. Good luck," I was like, "oh dayum. I AM alone, aren't I?" I remember being completely lost as to what to do next. Then I went and k*lled a minor NPC, and began using his shack as a temporary base for storing all my stuff. XD That shack really helped me out, until I eventually moved to a larger city (forgot its name).
Morrowind was my last taste of the Elder Scrolls back when I used to be an adventurer funnily enough, when they ditched the spellcrafting I just never got around to picking up any of their games. Maybe it's because it took so long to fall to my price point for a mid Bethesda game, I only just picked up FO4 and FO76 a couple months ago when they were at $10.
Vivec City? I lived in a free apartment there. Morrowind was my first foray into the Elder Scrolls (and big RPGs), too, and I just fell in love with the game. As much as I love Oblivion and Skyrim, Morrowind just has that something-something that makes it a very special game experience.
As someone old enough to have played Morrowind when it first came out, that was probably Bethesda's creative peak. A few random comments. Every new release since Morrowind, has been "streamlined". And as a result, had lost some previous fans, while gaining more mass, mainstream, sales. That is the 20 year story of Bethesda in a nutshell. Why should they put huge efforts into leading edge, high quality stories and branching narratives, when the more casual each succesive game is, the more it sells? You mentioned Radiant AI for Oblivion. As I recall, the main criticism of Morrowind at the time was that the world, particularly the NPCS were static. They stood around forever. So Radiant AI was hyped as every NPC leading their own life. That you could go on a quest in a cave, for example, and find some NPC had already dealt with the baddies. There were previews of NPCs behaving almost like humans in in MMO. But this basically made the game too random and a coherent story unplayable, so was gutted before release. Stripped back to basic schedules and no actual radiant AI as originally intended. Also, many people hated Oblivion gates. They liked the first one or two, but they got repetitive and you'd soon coudln't face them..see the pattern? Always keen to cut and paste and repeat assets in game. Oh, and many gamers absolutely hated the level scaling. It seemed put in as a cheap, quick alternative to setting sensible, manual scaling for the game. Was very controversial at the time. And others found the depth lacking after Morrowind. Being able to join all factions, even with contradictory aims, where in Morrowind you had to choose as joining one, would put you opposed to others. I think perhaps the bugs are not the single biggest problem with bethesda. People focus on them as obvious and objective. For me, a bigger, core problem, is their desire to keep hyping up "HUGE" game worlds that end up being either empty, repetitive or both! Most games have significant bugs on release these days. They get fixed and then the game is fine. BSG problem is that even when the bugs are fixed, the repetition, shallow stories, the emptiness, the lack of genuine interaction etc is still there. Starfield really is not ruined by bugs - but it is boring because all the rest of those Beth negatives that have been festering for 20 years reached their peak in it. When you put it all together, as you've done, and with the awful mobile phone games (I wasn't aware of those), it's obvious they are a company with minimal interest in games and lots of interesting in making money for the least work possible. And no, Starfield couldn't have been some huge team working for 10 years on it. It's clearly the minimum hack possible to put a cut and shunt of Fallout and Skyrim in space. And for a company that seems to love exploiting their market, it's jaw dropping how they appear to fail to understand what people loved about their games before. I do wonder if part of it is that we just grow out of the BSG formula as we age - and perhaps only return to it when we are old enough that senility hides the flaws :-)
Thank you for the good analysis. IMHO the problem is, that nearly all big studios are on the stock market or owned by big corporations. So, it is not about gaming any more but about exploitation of an IP. Elder Scrolls is an IP, Fallout is an IP, Bethesda is an IP -- and people buy the products with these IPs even when they are bad -- so that makes those IPs interesting for the big players -- not the games, not the players or even delivering a good product.
@@anypercentdeathless The lead writer even talked openly about it, that he believes the players don't care about the story (and I guess writing). So it is no wonder. I would even be not so surprised if they used AI -- wait, that might even improve writing.
The most amazing thing is that every bethesda release has the SAME bugs for decades that have been solved by modders the day of release and then they just pop up again in the next game. Suck it, consumer: CONSUME
@@bdleo300Actually it's much worse than that. Oblivion gates had lots of enemies, unique structures, and sigil stones as rewards, plus there was a whole different world outside of them. With Starfield the worlds are empty, even the Factions and main quest line are just... boring, it lacks the same flair and Personality that Oblivion or even Skyrim had.
They refuse to change the engine because they know their games depend on mods being easy to make and fixing the game for them. It's a terrible idea for a game model.
To me Bethesda suffered because they gave in. Every new game they came out with after Morrowind became more dumbed down and more easy to digest for casuals. The moment you do that I think you’re diluting the pool already. The best games are products of unwavering artistic vision. Where people truly do not care to appeal to everyone and are okay having a dedicated fan base who enjoys their product for what it is
Oblivion was an oversimplification of Moroowind, made for any kids to play. Smash that button, follow the marker, never read anything, fast travel. @juliusfishman7222
Morrowind, aswell, was "simplified". In Daggerfall, you had Banks, you can buy horses, ships and houses (and not only five houses). You can ask for loans, you also had more skills (like swiming, crimbing and speech related skills to make some encounters, easy), the daedric gods, need to be summoner at some specific days, had multuple endings... Of course, I can undestand that they cut some things, but, at the end of they day, they also simplified Morrowind (in that case, maybe for good, because Daggerfall, was a very clunky game btw)
@Amonny yeah but the missions had nice stories and it was immersive, but skyrim was a comete shiiishow after playing the mage guild mission completely it finally dawned on me this game isn't gonna give me the joy I had with oblivion. Every mission was a chore it was like the world was made to be just a game for low iq gamers
I used to be an adventurer, and now as someone who actually likes Fallout 4 in the state it is now, I agree 100% with all your criticisms of the game. Indeed, the only reason I'm putting in so many hours even now is due to the Sim Settlements 2 mod, which not only vastly improves the settlement building minigame, but also incorporates the system into its own main story, which I feel fits in much better to Fallout 4's scavenging gameplay loop than the original's pithy 'save your kid' storyline. That said, I'm one of those people who actually _likes_ the settlement-building stuff, so I'm definitely biased. Indeed, while I haven't played Starfield yet (I was going to wait for a GotY Edition, but not anymore though lol), I have got the sneaking suspicion that Bethesda actually expects modders to do the majority of the work. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but all those empty planets and limited radiant encounters definitely make me think Bethesda expected modders to save their arses.
i like SSM as well, but that mod is far from perfect, like it's great in some areas of the mod where other areas of the mod could use a lot of work or simply scrap some ideas for others, like the whole building in the GNN, that system is so damn buggy and the script is most of the time unresponsive, i wish he would just scrap that system and make it less interactive on the player where it was optional having the player build, like pay some architect "NOT YOU" to do it, so all you have to do is pay the money to get it done like most skyrim mods handle things. i do like that there is a skip option built into the mod because there are many times where this mod gets stuck and there is nothing the player can do to fix that section of the mod, but the issue with the skipping is that it will pass crucial sections of the story that make you mad that you missed out on simply because the quest decided to bug out for whatever reason. i think i understand why he's separated his mod in sections because i'm experiencing this buggyness in his most up to date full mod SSM 2 chapter 3. i feel like i need to just get the chapter 3 of the mod, but idk if it will have all the other stuff i don't like in the mod and i hope it has a quest skipper because it would be a drag having to build something when you really want to skip doing any of the building because it's hard to understand or the script lags or becomes unresponsive and makes you want to stop using the mod because of these issues. i know his modding skills are good, and he has a lot of great potential in the scene, but some of the choices that he's made in the mod don't exactly fill me with a whole lot of hope in how it will get done, like there should be more choices in how things get done because as it is right not it's way too restrictive and forces the player to do things they don't want to do for various reasons, the mechanics he made for the general settlements is good, but inside that damn GNN building and some of the stuff you do with that salvidor NPC is some of the most painstakingly annoying and frustrating to deal with nonsense that should have other options to accomplish the goals, like the build menu in so many areas is just bad just poorly optimized and thought out. i mean how is it that modders for skyrim found ways to make stuff like this far more simple but in FO4 everything has to be overly complicated to a halt where nothing gets done because of issues that exist in the base game are being utilized too much to the point where it's frustrating to deal with.
its not a good game and anyone who says otherwise deserves to be bethesda's paypig, but fallout 4 does hit a very under utilized genre that makes it worth playing; the scavenger game. there are so few of them that even a bad game can be pretty good.
@@comyuse9103 i know lately a lot of people have been shitting on FO4 for it's writing, but that wasn't my issue with the game in fact i found it was very well made for the story and the choices you can make and for the story, now i would agree it sucks that the story didn't allow you not to be the soul survivor so you can role play as someone else. but the story as is isn't that bad to be honest, it provides many options to where the story goes and ends so you have multiple endings, starfield on the other hand from what i hear as i'm not playing that game any time soon, that game only offers the same outcome it's only different to which NPC it effects in the story, but otherwise it's very lackluster in choices and a lot of people don't really like the main story to begin with anyway, but it's strength's are only within the mechanics of the ship building and the adventures you embark on, but the load screen issues and the menu issues and how you can't really fly your ship outside that one small box in space and the exploration of the game it all feels stale, now i have seen enough gameplay videos of other people playing the game to understand what they are talking about and i would agree with them. however i feel like bethesda can fix the game and the writing to a degree, i'm not saying it will be anything like NMS when it comes to traveling in your ship or the writing will be anything like cyberpunk or witcher, but some things i know they can fix because i already know the potential fixes this engine is capable of, story telling is something that can be fixed, they just have to hire a bunch of other writers to fix the current one and offer more options for the player. i think it's a good thing bethesda is being attacked right now because these are things they have been brushing off for so long now that they have become complacent in their games and have slacked on many aspects of their games that they need to pay more attention to in order to grow and make better games in the future. now they are expected to actually fix their game and that's what we expect as the players and if they want to continue making games for the future they better do a shit load better then they have been for this last decade, again, growing pains are good for a better product as this is where it will lead.
@@5226-p1e Fallout 4 is miles ahead of Starfield in terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, and it might be Bethesda's coolest game world to date. I love the scrapping/rebuilding aspect to it as well. It's greatest flaw is the story. The whole "Sole Survivor" aspect is fine, it's arguably a neat hook into an otherwise well-trod setting. The problem was giving the player an unavoidable backstory and a child kidnapped before you even leave the vault. There was no need to further motivate the player beyond being the sole survivor of an effed up Vault-Tec experiment. Shaun's presence just creates an external imperative that forces the player to either speed-run the main story, or break immersion by choosing to not give a shit about your missing child. Honestly, every BGS game is immediately followed by an alternate start mod where you actually do get to control your backstory and role, and I think a smart move would just be to do that going forward. It would require more work, but, uh, that's what the hundreds of millions of dollars is for.
@@jspotter89 i agree, and that's why mods such as the start me up mod are so great as it changes all that potential dialogue, now if only someone can fix the stupid nuka world quest to make it better to become a raider lol. that was the most empty DLC i have ever played for a quest DLC in any bethesda game.
Starfield has cured my insomnia, its so boring that it puts me to sleep, when I go to bed all it takes is 5 mins of playing it and out I am, thats the best thing about it.
Such a shame, it made No Man’s Sky seem a lot better. Hopefully they can learn from the NMS experience and make some changes. Bethesda games should be about wandering around in investigating the world for hidden goodies, Starfield kind of failed at that.
you simply can NOT talk about mistakes of Todd Howard and his studio, without emphasizing the UI. and how it just keeps getting worse, no matter how many times anyone complains
and even worse is how the devs talk baout what ui mods they use, like. its a fucking parody at this point, theyre so supud and entitled they blatantly show they expect the community to fix their games instead of actually making a good ui themselves
I hear this said so many times. I play a lot of games and I think it always boils down to people will put up with terrible UI if people say the game is good. FromSoft UI is ... quite bad. But it gets a 10/10. New Vegas used the same UI as Fo3 and COULD have changed it if they wanted to... But people still blame Bethesda somehow and say New Vegas is perfect. I'm not white knighting Bethesda but the bias is clear to see.
@@512TheWolf512what they are trying to say is that if starfield was good, youd rarely talk about the ui. If the game is good, you wouldn’t talk about one or two things bad more than the 100 other things that is good. BG3 is a good example.
Agreed. People place too much importance and stock in developers as a conglomerate and the brand they front. In practice, companies are only as strong as their employees and when all the mega valuable ones leave the company for greener pastures... sorry to say, folks, but that dev isn't who you think it is any more. May as well give them a completely new name because that's basically what it is - a team of completely different people than the ones who know how to make the games we used to love.
Their first Terminator game in 1990/1 was almost an immersive sim, you were in the role of protector or assassin and you had to navigate and use LA to win. You could break the law or not. Have shootouts with the cops, drive cars, some of them manual gears, steal from shops, use hospitals, rob banks. Then they just went the straight FPS route with Rampage/Future Shock and Skynet. But they did have Arena out when those came along.
I used to be an adventurer like you but then Fallout 76 and Starfield hit me in the head and waked me up. God i wish i was still dreaming Bethesda used to be great and awesome not anymore nothing last's forever it seems unfortunately. Honestly i'm done with Bethesda and their shitty and broken games period. Other than that a great video keep up the great work👍 And greetings from the Netherlands🇳🇱
That's truly crazy! My overriding memory of Oblivion was after I had escaped the dungeons and walked out into the daylight one of the first things I saw was a soldier on a horse who walked past looking at me suspiciously.
Oblivion really was the first sign of what was to come, microtransactions, breaking older systems that gave people the ability to make insanely powerful characters if they knew what they were doing, discarding RPG systems in favor of simpler ones or nothing at all, and so on. It got away with that however, mostly because despite all those problems, it was still a pretty fun game.
Fallout 4 would have been a much better game if the raider gang factions were in the initial release so you could choose them over the minutemen, and you could do things like raid and enslave the initiative etc. However by the time Nuka World came out I was just playing to grab those last few achievements, it was a good expansion but it came way too late.
I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I realized that the decline of Bethesda really started with Morrowind. Because despite Morrowind being a fantastic game it's the first game to start simplifying and taking away roleplaying elements and scope rather than adding to them. Although my ideal Elder Scrolls VI would be one with Morrowind's strange and complex world, Oblivion's side quest writing and roleplay mechanics and Skyrim's very well-refined exploration and perks system. Good video, by the way. I enjoyed it. Although I wish the ending had done more of a high-level recap.
Most of the people at Obsidian who worked on New Vegas left a long time ago. Giving Fallout back to them doesn't mean we'll get a game as good as New Vegas. Likely it would be the same quality as Outer Worlds.
I haven't even given Starfield a try and probably never will. I'm more interested in finding a way to try out Morrowind. But it's hard to find the time anymore. You see, I used to be an adventurer like you until I became overburdened with responsibility. And took an arrow in the knee 😂
I used to be an adventurer, so I won't torture you with a long essay. This video popped up in my suggestions, and judging by the merits of this video alone I'm happy to say I've discovered another great content creator. Easy sub!
Skyrim was probably the first time I experienced a game breaking bug, even if it never crashed my game Even to this day I’m still wary when I start the Forsworn conspiracy quest even though it’s been years since it got patched Ive always had a bad opinion of Markarth because of it
For me there were two instances. I met up with Delphine and esbern while they were fighting forsworn and they would attack me and wouldn't stop. Another one was that the whole map was hostile towards me and when I put my weapon away they'd stop them immediately attack again for some reason and I couldn't even go to jail (neither time did I commit a crime nor attack them)
now the game has a random chance of "hey you you finally awake" in literal black void OR the carts get glitched on something and don't move OR you can't physically make it to helgen because for you the gate is closed and you can't go through it a random chance but that shit can hapen very rarely on vanilla
The decline in my opinion started with Oblivion which was watered down from Morrowind, and even more so in Skyrim. In fact the only thing that made Skyrim good was the mods.
I really liked Daggerfall. I only just started playing it. If i had to make a choice between Daggerfall and Morrowind, it would definitely be Daggerfall. The Systems were better and more detailed. I love how you could make a really strong character from the start if you focused on no more than 2 combat skills. I also love how you could control how fast to level up in the difficultly balance system. If you level up fast, the game will in turn be harder and vise versa. I also loved the way you could chose the battle pacing of the NPCs and the economy and political simulation was clearly suprior as well. If ES6 combine 2 games from the series, it should be Daggerfall and Skyrim along with the new machanics they make. If you combine the simulation of Skyrim and Daggerfall together, along with Daggerfall Character Creation (as far as skills, attributes, advantages and disadvantages) on CE2, that would be amazing. ES also should go back to the dice roll system (from Daggerfall).
My understanding is that a lot Morrowind was made with a "get it done" mentality. Apparently Bethesda was pressured to get it done quick, so there was a mentality of doing just "good enough". The problem is this turned into a trend with every game since then getting worse and worse. Oblivion even had a couple of loading screens that lied to the player, by talking about content that never made it into the game.
The conclusion is very eloquent and so applicable to many popular media franchises. Call of Duty, Halo, Battlefield, Destiny, Pokémon, Disney, Marvel, Star Wars.
Morrowind was clearly their peak. The only thing Bethesda added to their games since then was voice-acting; everything else was streamlined, for better or for worse, until we got no NPCs in Fallout 76 and minimal fun (with some shipbuilding) in Starfield.
For a lot of younger gamers, it may be hard to see just how staggeringly unprofessional and downright infantile Corporate (Gaming Companies Especially) behavior has become. As a GenX'er born in 1970, my parents & grandparents would probably just flat out refuse to believe we'd reach the point we have. Going even into the early Oughts, 'talking back' to your customer, saying things like, 'Who are YOU to criticize our car? You just drive them, you don't know how to MAKE them.' would be seen as not just unprofessional, but actually unHINGED. Videogame Companies are almost certainly the worst of the lot. Going back to the 'Mass Effect 3' debacle (now 12 years ago), it was the same. 'You think our product is broken and provide reasons why? Well... just shut up you entitled Basement-Dwelling Manbaby!' It's been so bad over the last decade it's likely the rule rather than the exception. 'Used to be an Adventurer?' I still am! ^_^
There is a noticeable cycle of having massive ambitions for their game, putting too many eggs in their basket, and ending up at the end of the year with a buggy mess that is not even half of the scope. That void which Bethesda time and time again creates for their Games in the form of bugs and mechanics that don't even work, eventually gets filled by modders, then you get to a point where everyone says "that game is bare bones without at least 100 mods."
Well I think the thing is, you need to rate their games compared to others. Bethesda always pushes the limits (until Starfield) and its eyes are bigger than their bellies so to speak. People bitch and whine about them, but used to light years ahead of others. I love Fallout more than any other game, and I know some people bitch about it, but the fact is, for less than a hundred bucks I’ve had thousands of hours playing it, and I can’t wait for Fallout London which looks like it’s going to be amazing!
People like to make jokes about Skyrim having 17 re-releases. But the only reason it re-released that many times is cuz people kept buying it. That's just how good of a game Skyrim is. Unfortunately, I don't know if I have the same hope for elder scrolls 6 anymore.
A very good and quite sad video. Starfield isn't awful, but it is painfully average, takes so many misteps and now IMO means its now been 12 years since they made a great game.
Honestly, I believe bethesda could manage to gaslight people into believing their games are good for the next ten years if their games started running like butter and improved performance.
I wonder what the future holds for BGS. Will they change things up due to the negative reception Starfield got, or will they look at their sale numbers and just continue doing what they were? Despite all the issues starfield has it still has pretty die hard fans, so who knows. One thing I do know, subscribing to Mugthief was a good decision, and if it wasn't for starfield I wouldn't have found this channel.
They continued to dumb their games down in a variety of ways for a long time now, they keep employing Emil even though the actual writing in stories has been not good, in fact i would argue it was never a strong point of BGS to begin with just like with the combat... All that is to say they have a very long history of not wanting to change for the better. Why would they change now? As long there are people keep saying "starfield's combat is good/fun" even though its extremely basic and indicative of how they have not actually played any fun FPSs like Cyberpunk ( purely talking about combat here ), despite claiming the game to be a disappointment, that is still overlooking issues, Bethesda will get away with selling under the umbrella of "bethesda" The problem is people still keep flocking to "its not a bad game just mediocre". But how is that a good argument? How many AAA games actually get dubbed "bad", people need to realize that mediocre writing, bad stealth, low roleplay value, extremely simple and limiting combat in actuality means bad even if that meets your "average AAA game" experience. The bar has been set so low, that its okay to release a completely mediocre game with no redeeming qualities.
@@AngRyGohan I agree. My experience with starfield was mediocrity, and honestly that's worse than it being a bad game. Mediocre games get forgotten, the market is over saturated with mediocre games. One thing did become apparent, BGS no longer wants to make games for rpg fans. Their games are meant for casual gamers, which is fine. It's just not for me.
@@aersla1731 The problem with being completely for casual gamers whose bar for a "good game" is much lower is that the rest of us gets left in a dust, which actually effects us contrary to what they will say. I'm looking at a game like Hades that feels like a AAA game ( with how much voice acting there is especially that high quality ), yet there seems to be no demand for a AAA roguelike. It makes you wonder about the possibilities that could be made for a cRPG with an actual AAA budget, but all we hear about how "DnD/Pathfinder/etc" cannot be even remotely implemented even though you have plenty of previous examples of actual massive branching choices for games ( pathfinder wotr, some missions for Larian games or even witcher 2 ) already exist. I'm not saying its actually possible to replicate, but It cannot be even remotely implemented because they care not to even try to the slightest and we are left with choices of illusion and a very few niche interactions at best in AAA games at least. I think it will be a long time before i enjoy another new AAA open world game ( that wants to imitate an RPG in someway, not counting Elden Ring here ) after Cyberpunk. After Starfield's and Hogwarts's Legacy's success i will evade more AAA games than ever, even if that means i have to evade Dreadwolf.
@@AngRyGohan Well said, but the AAA space has always catered to the biggest demographic. There will always be outliers like what you mentioned, even then I don't expect good rpgs from the AAA space anymore. We have independent studios that do great work, and once in a while we get a banger AAA game.
@@jhonayo4887 That's it. It should have begun with leaving earth and put us in the colony wars. The Constellation plotline could have come later where you'd be a war vet and a civilian contractor and the NG+ should have been strange and weird beyond just the Lodge. And of course with aliens and vehicles!
I won't lie im so over being "the chosen one" for any plot line in video games. Give me a living breathing world I can be a part of and live in. Not "you were chosen bc xyz..."
Bethesda never understood Fallout at all. People always cite " Fallout 4 sold Millions!!" and i dont care, sales numbers dont count for sh*t when it comes to having a QUALITY product. Black Isle Studios/INterplay were and StiLL are the original creators of Fallout. Pete Hines... mr." We're not beholden to something written Twenty years ago", " Lore is for nerds shut the F up and play our games". He should have never been the head of Public Relations. And Emil needs to be fired for all the bad writing he was allowed to get away with. I will tear him a new one every time i see his face online.
I only trust the real life ppl i know personally who tell me they like Fo4 and thats no one. Or its a "decent" at best comment. But somehow the internet has these FO4 die hards but where are they in my actual life?
@@Guinn-ish If I couldn't mod Fallout 4 I would not play it all. Due to mods I have over 2500 hrs. I think the same goes for Skyrim even. I don't like a lot of BGS vanilla mechs as they tend to make their games annoying, frustrating, or non-fun.
For me the end arrived with Skyrim but I only Saw it with Fallout 4. Now Let me explain, I deeply appreciate how they moved from the "Pen and Paper" Isometric system of FO1 and FO2 to a 3D A-RPG in FO3 and I realize that the radiant System in Skyrim, for the time, was a big step foward but I noticed how they were leaning to much in the "go where you want" side of their philosophy design than the "play as you want" side. I distencly remember being disappointed in how simplistic was the main quest in skyrim, especially in respect to oblivion's (It wasn't as well written as Morrowin's final quest, but I enjoyed it).In Oblivion you invade the Gardern where the head honco of the Dawn is hidden, kill him and then assist Martin who then turns into a dragon and stop the final invasion. In Skyrim, You capture a dragon, ride it and then bash the head of alduin. It was disappointing, especially considering how I enjoyed some side quests even more than the main quest and how the expansions (IMO) were lackluster and plain. But I simply thought that It was me the problem, that maybe I needed some respite from Videogame RPG. Then I brought last year FO4 (I had exams and choose to focus my time on the TTRPG side and play less videogames) and I was disappointed in everyway possible. I hated all companions execpt Nick Valentine. I hated the Crafting System, the dumbed down Perk system and most of all I hated how empty it felt. BGS make big worlds as an ocean but deep as a puddle. The NPC where indepent from the player but they were so hollow that maybe having them standing around was better. I think that their mistake was focusing on the size and not the content and showing in the Radiant System which is a great piece of software but it doesn't mean you need it for everything. Sorry for the wall of text, Also Exclude FO New Vegas from this consideration since I love it.
the thing is, give it some time, you will realise you don't "hate " any of it , rather you are disapointed in the waste of potential which hurt so much more than just shallow hate
They literally peaked at morrowind, anyone who didn't realise that once oblivion came out just didn't get it. The novel quality writing sans-shitty voice acting made the world way more detailed, nuanced and mature. Actual dice rolls and RPG elements, making your character actually unique rather than a jack of all trades. You had to actually work up the ranks of factions (and required skills) and they had branching paths that made sense in the world. The just threw in the towel and stopped trying with future games. The most generic, bare bones drivel with bog standard high fantasy tropes. Gaming also all turned to shit during the longest, most stagnate, gaming period we had ever with the ps3/360 generation holding back both hardware and software technology for years.
Emil doesn't listen to feedback, he admitted it himself. He also explained why their games started to focus more on building stuff and less on story telling.
I used to be an adventure until a glitch took my knee into the ceiling. The video was right on the money with how I felt with modern bethesda games after the honeymoon period.
before the horse armor happened, Capcom in 2005 had an alternate solution that had its own drawback in the G rank releases. there were rereleases of the Monster Hunter games that included essentially a post game rank. where in base game you had low and high rank where monsters would get stronger and your geer would also improve if made again with the higher rank monster materials. until Monster Hunter World's Icebborne expansion, the first of these to be available as both a classic bundled or ultimate release and as a download for players that had the base game so you didn't have to buy the game twice at full price for like a little over a game and a half rather than starting off their added content as just a horse cosmetic. yep, there is very good reason that the more cultured people against Bethesda give them the meme name of Bugthesda. both Skyrim and Fallout 4 had bugs where the scripted prologue just froze so you couldn't start the game. i played Fallout 4 years after all the dlc was out and still ran into that bug where you can't get out of the cryo pod. the pattern is simple, make a glitchy template of a game, let the modders fix it, and reuse their assets without paying them... or prevent a lawsuit later by creativing a program where they get payed if Bugthesda gets control and a cut of profits on formerly free content.
My main account was banned for having duped ammo. Made an alt account, bought fallout 1st for a year because it was cheaper. Played for a few more months and quit. Was figuring out which email I used for Disney + so I could cancel it and saw a receipt for fallout 1st and realized I’ve been charged every year by them for 4 years. I canceled it a long time ago, but it’s still auto-renewing…
I used to be an adventurer .... I never really played any bethesda game, tried some for a bit, didn't appeal to me, move on. I understood that the game could be great for someone who likes it and never care more about them. But yeah i gotta say since 76 and all the marketing and communications ... huh... quirks, i didn't even try to look at starfield when it released. And tbf, i wasn't at all surprised when soon after release i saw videos harshly criticizing it in my YT feed. Since then i started to watch a few videos talking about past bethesda game and eventually led me here : nice video. As i said, i never played the games, but your oppinion seems fair about the strength and issues the games have, and i enjoyed watching it.
Its funny to live in an era where AAA games are so bad that you can predict their mistakes before they even launch, how bizzare this world we live in is
18:20 Wont ever happen but is a neat idea: Obsidian " earned" the Fallout franchise after NewVegas. Just like " Blackbox" earned the NfS franchise in the 2000´s and released banger fater banger. But to this day BGS doesnt even want to recognize that the best Fallout game wasnt developed by them :) Starfield didnt have alot of bugs for me, but after 30h I had to uninstall it due to the loading screens and the lackluster content. After Starfield iam playing modded NewVegas again and I can see how the unique structure would have benefited modern BGS games so well. But the writing also plays a big parts and with Emil on the front I dont see a bright future for BGS.
The worst Bethesda bug I ever encountered was the dragons flying backwards in Skyrim. If memory serves correct it was after a patch to fix some other bug and made the game rather unplayable because the dragons would also NOT LAND.
Bugthesda is the 1/2 creator and the one to blame Of today's gaming standard and what to expect for every single new gaming release: release now (an unfinished, broken, often unplayable product), fix later (and monetize as much as possible with it). The other 1/2 is the gamers/buyers/consumers accepting it as normal paying full price for a defective product KNOWING that it is/will be broken and defective. 🤷🏻♂️
Let's put it this way. Bethesda keeps changing things with Skyrim so that I periodically have to troubleshoot to make it work (particularly with the unstated new requirement to start a Bethesda account and manually activate your NON-Creation Club mods through Bethesda---and the game still crashes to desktop). I can't be bothered to do multiple troubleshooting days together for a game, so what did I do? I went back to Morrowind, which I play ever 5 years or so anyway, and I know I can count on it to run.
Obsidian is creatively/morally owed as many shots at their original IP as they’d like There is an alternate reality where Bethesda didn’t outbid them for fallout and actually put the work in to make their own new ip
Shareholders must be stripped of any kind of agency in what the company does. It made a lot of sense originally since they are co-owners of the company. But now their influence is too often purely negative.
'Legendary Gamebryo'... Legends say they use it without any changes to this day XD "It reached a boiling point with starfield"..? No, the boiling point was fallout 4, 76 was the point where the pot was left without water and burned down the stove, and starfield is the point that people kept ignoring it somehow and now the entire house is on fire
I wanted SF to be good.. badly. Played around 40 hours and two things killed me: bugs and loading screens. It’s 2024 and you have a LS when entering a shop? Wow. And the bugs.. ish.
Bugs? Say what you want about the game but it's their least buggy and most stable release. I kept getting CTDs in F3/Skyrim, never had any in F4/Starfield. Loading screens... yes... when you enter a shop and there's nothing there but a counter with an NPC behind it and NOTHING ELSE then why...? Just why???
Starfield really feels like Bethesda tried to make Kingdom Come: Deliverance but using the tried and proven false engine they've been using for 20 years instead of some modern counterpart or something, therefore giving all the jank of Skyrim to the oddly open world of an actual exploration RPG.
Oblivion is my favorite of the series, and where I definitely feel the hit the sweet spot for rpg depth. Skyrim is just missing too much. Without attributes and classes, every character is essentially the same. Everyone can be an all powerful, spell flinging, ultra sneaky, super strong murder hobo who crafts all the things. In Oblivion, you could still get good at whatever you wanted, but if your attributes weren’t up for it, you wouldn’t be very good at it. There’s no reason to make multiple characters, they are all just…..you. No roles to play.
Oblivion's level scaling coupled with broken leveling system ruined any RPG depth out of it. Classes are good if they're unique, not if they're just a combination of preffered attributes and skills that you choose in custom class anyway because vanilla game incentivizes you to not roleplay your intended role but to do complete opposite of roleplaying to level efficiently. Skyrim's removal of classes is an example streamlining done kinda right, although I'd still prefer it if they fixed the core issue (level scaling) rather than removing RPG features. Skyrim is also poor when it comes to roleplaying systems but at least its leveling problems aren't as bad as Oblivion. You can also have deep RPG system without classes.
In 2002 when morovind came out there was only 1 rpg game that could match it or even surpass it. Gothic and Gothic 2 night of the raven. Those 2 were on another level.
Their decline began after Daggerfall, each succeeding game was less ambitious than the last srspite having more resources and time. If you gave the people who made Daggerfall the resources and technologies of modern Bethesda, they wosuld have crafted the vision they had of a vivid world with total freedom to climb about and murder kings, then watch the fallout of that, that they wanted. Modern Bethesda has no passion, no ambition, no dreams, and that is why they fail.
I used to be an adventurer... I came for the BG3 content and stayed for everything else! Honesty, I was so surprised how small your channel is compared to the quality of the videos and the essays. I am looking forward to see your channel grow bc you truly deserve it! You quickly became one of my fav gaming RUclipsrs (your voice is also very pleasent to listen to )
Well I remember playing Skyrim back in like 2012 thinking this game feels dated, old. I absolutely love that atmosphere of the game so I forgave the fact that it's simple. it's been a decade and there's been zero innovation. It's pathetic
"Please. Give Fallout to Obsidian." I agree and would take it one further. Give **Elder Scrolls** to Obsidian. I would love to see what they'd do with it and at this point I don't think Bethesda's main studio can be trusted with ES any longer.
Let me be clear, Bethesda is a shell of its former self. I loved Bethesda. Skyrim was my favorite game. Fallout 4 is the only one I have played, and it’s ok. I switched to Xbox to follow Bethesda. I have never cared about exclusives, but I had to get ES6, and looked forward to Starfield. The release of Starfield has shifted my perception of Bethesda. They killed my hopes for ES6 with that game, and how dated the RP felt. HUGE let down. Thanks Todd
80s gamer here. Neither Morrowind or Oblivion impressed me. I enjoyed Skyrim and Fallout 4 (after modding the retarded "dialogue wheel". Fuck Mass Effect and fuck Dragon Age 2. Probably an even worse invention than quicktime events). I started out with Ultima and SSI Goldbox. I have in recent times learned to appreciate Morrowind's worldbuilding, and I did appreciate its visuals at the time. But year 2000 when it came out, games like Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 had perfected dialogue-driven character-driven CRPG's, while Morrowind was... well... Wikipedia. Almost no memorable NPC's and no companions. It looked good. I give them that. And having finished the whole thing there are at least some NPC's in there, even if Morrowind felt like a weird hybrid between 3d engine and text-adventure. Oblivion however, hit rock bottom. Potato faces I couldn't relate to. Most of the quests being humorous in nature. A dialogue system that amounted to "Rumors". A level system that was incredibly dumb. This was at the time we had games like Bloodlines, KOTOR, neverwinter nights, the Gothic trilogy etc. We had been spoonfed great rpg's for a decade, and Oblivion simply didn't even try to present interesting npc dialogue, or npc's for that matter. When people was worried about Fallout 3 because it was "Oblivion with Guns", it was because compared to the very deep RPG's we had been fed with for over a decade, Oblivion was very shallow and dumbed down in almost every aspect beyond the nature engine.
That's not exactly a high bar. The new mass effect will be praised as long as its better than ME Androgynous : My Face Is Tired Edition, another historic failure.
I'm not sick. You're imagining that my voice is different. It's the same as always. Hope you enjoy the video, and if you like and subscribe I promise I'll love you forever!
i hope we imagine your voice as we used to soon.
i do have one important question, why do you have so much faith in Obsidian when they are no longer the same people running the company?
it's almost like you believe they are the same Obsidian who made FONV when it's been roughly 15 years since then, especially considering their last game was the outer worlds, it wasn't much better than Bethesda's starfield sadly, hell it was even worse than their own FONV.
so i ask again, why do you have such faith in Obsidian when they aren't even the same company anymore and their content hasn't improved all that much in all that time?
in many ways it seems like they try to mimic bethesda but on a smaller scale, but their writing isn't that much better, so what do you hope to accomplish at the end of the day?
now i personally liked the voiced protagonist in FO4 and wish bethesda would keep it up with that trend like all other normal games that do the whole RPG thing, but the community is full of morons sometimes who like the silent protagonist and now we have starfield and many saying that among many other bad designs is indeed a bad design.
they would have been better providing it anyway but allowing all the special people who didn't like it to turn it off as a built in feature to the game.
that way they could please all parties who play the game, but i swear the people who complained about one thing in the form for another feature to be stripped away only held bethesda back with their stupid demands that have made Bethesda's games worse, like a bunch of people wanted not only the non voiced player but they also wanted the stupid Oblivion camera that really gets up close and personal, what is the point in character creation if you never see your face, this is the same criticisms that cyberpunk had at launch, why you never see yourself in 2nd person during conversations, so why character creation if you never see your character?
it's because stupid people with stupid decision making skills bully bethesda into doing stupid things, i mean they make some stupid decisions on their own for sure, but much of that stupidity comes from the stupid community who demand for stupid things.
just when you thought bethesda might improve in their later games they allow stupid people with stupid ideas run the show, no advancing into the future for their games because the fans want things to be exactly like Morrowind, well thanks a lot boomers for your stupid ideas to restrict progress in bethesda games.
now i'm not against payed mods so long as the pricing is right for all parties involved, when someone releases an armor mod for something like 8 bucks is way too much and should never be considered in that system and should always offer much more.
the way bethesda currently has it set up is not that great and ultimately bethesda sets the price because bethesda are greedy motherfuckers and tend to not understand how to properly price balance anything even in their games at times.
they know they wouldn't be here without the modding scene, so they offer this idea of the creation club or creations whatever they want to call it now, the point is it's a market provided to the modders if they choose to use that system, but it really needs to be further implemented to fit all parties desires so it doesn't feel too greedy, i think they would be much better off doing a subscription system for the mods instead of making each and every user pay out the ass for creation or creations content, that will ease up on the idea of it being too scum like which right now it often feels like that due to some mods being released for that much money for little to nothing in said mod as the result.
i think the start screen thing was really stupid lol, like most people hate the start screen and just want to get passed it as fast as possible, one of my favorite mods makes FO4's main screen blank and black and clean as i wait for it to load the load screen, i wish there was only one load screen but the front screen for some reason also counts as a load screen.
so i pretty much go through "2 separate load screens" at the beginning, before i can play my game, and that's every bethesda game since the beginning of time lol.
That brief mention of foreshadowing got a laugh out of me. Well done. I used to be an adventurer like you, but if I go back to Starfield, it'll only be because I foolishly pre-paid for the first expansion. Starfield did make me realize I was in an abusive relationship with my favourite game dev. But my eyes are open now, and they are sleeping on the couch, and I remind them every morning that it's time they got their own place again.
I love it. Sometimes there is wool over our eyes!
I definitely hit that point with FO76. Never again will I buy a bethesda product. At least some of the studios under them might produce something good, looking at you ID.
The title of this thumbnail is misleading it’s a rant about skyrim
I watched reviews and gameplay for starfield and decided it wasn’t worth it. It just looks so bland and boring. More people are playing Skyrim today, I am one of them.
Bethesda was building their vision of the PS5 dev kit, nowonder they were trying to make it PS5 exclusive, so they dont need to cut down on the vision due to the Series S limitations..
..
no wonder Bethesda didn't give a f ck anymore, after Xbox forced them on the Series S (and lied to them..)
...
F76 & other bad decisions were forced on Bethesda by Zenimax.., and now Xbox
its wild to me that junk cosmetics cost as much as games these days... how can anyone justify that
People care more about cosmetics than gameplay, story, and atmosphere.
Players ith more money than brains?
Because there are always those morons that buy that trash without thinking. Just look at that crap star citizen. 3D assets (space ships) costing $15.000 and idiots buy that. You could get a REAL thing for that cash, like a nice car. Instead of some in-game trash
The curse of live service mechanics leaking into single player experiences.
sadly, the dickheads that buy it justify it themselves.
I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I took a memory leak to the save file
😂 Excellent references
You didn't mention a big part of Oblivion that foreshadowed Bethesda's laziness. In Morrowind, the Khajit had cat feet, where their ankles were near the middle of where human shins would be and they walked on their toes rather than the soles of their feet.
But in Oblivion, they gave the Khajit regular human feet and said it would be too much work to give them a different walking animation instead of just copy pasting the generic human walk 😢😢😢😢
It is also when they lost their creative spark. Morrowind has strange alien architecture, egg mines, nyx hounds etc.
Cyrodil lost its jungles, and became a Lord of the Rings ripoff. The architecture, oblivion is just mordor, the wildlife is generic and the magic of the setting was largely lost.
I think they also did that because in morrowind, kahjits couldn't wear boots, so in order to not gate someone from loot, they changed it.
cyrodil was also supposed to be _deeply_ unique. it was originally a chinese styled empire built on a series of rivers in an untamed jungle with dragons roaming the land.
this is a very small but stupid point to make.
@@5226-p1eit's not. They have 10 unique races that became not unique.
I remember the backlash on forums over the Horse Armor was nuts, and the community seemed adamantly against it. In World of Warcraft, when the cosmetic helmets came out, people were getting votekicked in dungeons immediately for wearing them and the forums were aflame of people who bought them arguing against people who were retaliating.
It was a few years ago I was working on a remote jobsite with a bunch of guys I would refer to as "non-gamers". Big into sports, drinking, all that. But they all followed the same pattern - they bought the newest Playstation or XBox model, and bought FIFA, and Call of Duty every single release. They barely touched them, but it was like a pattern, a tribalistic team-based belief system. And they also all played this one zombie game on their phones, and were funnelling cash into it daily for more items, stamina, and all that garbage. I'd seen all the graphs and news articles about casual gamers being so prominent, but this was the first time I really saw how much these guys funnel into the industry.
The conversation had come up because I had mentioned I bought a new, expensive laptop for my out of town jobs and they were like "WHAAAAAT, you spent HOW MUCH?!", and I was curious on how much we'd each spent on gaming. Turns out, myself, the guy with a World of Warcraft account since release, an active FF14 account for ~2 years, a gaming PC, gaming desktop, plus peripherals, had spent less over ~20 years than these guys who had ~10 years. One of the dudes had event spent about $2500 on this stupid zombie game in less than a year.
I wonder how many of them would have, or did buy fucking Horse Armor.
That's addiction, bro. These games are pushing peoples buttons. So many people think they're not being manipulated or they're smart or immune to propaganda, but then I see the numbers from some of these gacha games and its like... yall aren't even thinking, like fat people who snack all day, they don't notice until its too late.
I was around for both situations and I don't remember any of that.on the official forums outside of laughing at the horse armor.
@@therealharshlycritical Then you weren't actually around.
@@haydentravis3348 And it ruins it for the rest of us. We have Bethesda and the Paid Mod Fiasco, garbage titles like 76, Starfield, Diablo 3/4, and massive ingame MMO shops because these idiots who don't even play their games will funnel cash in like mad.
"stop liking things I don't like" the post, making gaming of all things your whole personality doesn't make you an enlightened individual
The biggest problem is undoubtedly the simplification in both mechanics and lore.
Ability Scores? Gone.
Casting Spells while wielding a weapon? Gone.
The world, both mundane and eccentric at the same time? Almost gone.
Morally grey Characters on all sides? Gone.
It just sucks. They killed both the body and soul of their games.
Fallout 3's morality is infamously a joke. Nuke innocents for no reason, or don't. Genocide the wasteland, or not. Sacrifice yourself for no reason, don't.
@@Duchess_Van_Hoof no, no.
sacrifice yourself because they couldn't be bothered for other way to end the main quest.
@@Duchess_Van_Hoofwhen I first blew up Megaton and flooded Tennypenny Tower with ghouls I was expecting so much backlash as I progressed but literally you just get your dad saying "I am disappoint" and that's it. No one fucking cares except maybe Jericho who likes your evil, but theres not even a special relationship there.
@@geordiejones5618 Whats even worse is FO3 Dad only cares about Megaton and its fate; does not care if you burned Harold or shoot up Rivet City, or anything. A common comment I see on that relationship is the same one from FO4, there is supposed to be a parental relationship which is hinted towards but never is established beyond "Hello Blood Relative!" in either case. 4 is kind of forgivable, the baby you knew ain't what you find, but three is not as you have tons of time where you and your father should be spending time.
It's something that aggravates me to this day. Bad writing.
@@EddieSpaghetti69 Emil strikes again...
In Fallout 3, I got totally lost in the creepy subway tunnels under a ruined city. It was super dark and kinda scary, with weird noises and stuff all around. I was trying to find a way out, but it was like a maze down there. My pipboy flashlight didn’t help much in the green tint. While wandering around, I thought about my old life before all this craziness. I was like you once, an adventurer. But then I got hit in the knee with an arrow in a fight, and everything changed except war because that never changes. Now, here I was, lost in this spooky underground, just trying to find my way back. Like Bethesda after Starfield.
Miss the creepy factor in FO4. That thing only had graphics and modders to save it.
I've been play Bethesda games for 20 years and it's time for the top management to be replaced. I have zero expectations for future releases. I only played Starfield on gamepass and can't bring myself to play FO76.
Edit: If Obsidian ever gets another FO shot they have to get the old team back together many are not at the studio. Josh Sawyer being one that HAS to be part of it.
Sadly, a big change must happen in Bethesda to have another Fallout game done by Obisidian, because the higher-ups at Bethesda rejected their proposal to this and to do spin-off TES games according to a tweet from Chris Avellone.
One of FO4s big problems was the dialog system. The purpose of dialog choices in RPGs is to give the player control over the narrative. But most of the time BGS has ALREADY decided for you during critical story beats with dialog options that basically amount to:
1) YES
2) ALSO YES
3) MAYBE
4) SURE
Hoping for a crpg fallout from obsidian on the unreal engine (same as pillars of eternity)
It won't get better. Do you really think the corpos in charge will pick someone better? Microsoft is in charge now. It's over.
They’re going to have to improve. After starfield a lot of people are going to check the reviews before trying another Bethesda game
You forgot the best part about the FO1st controversy: someone bought out the web domain for Fallout First to rightfully dump on it, before Bethesda could.
The website is still online as of 1/2024.
I cut out a lot of stuff to keep it fast and fun, but THIS, I didn't know. That is really funny.
God damn. 😅 It's still there. Well, if they had just made a good, consumer-friendly game this wouldn't have happened. 😙
@@slicedtopieces You mustn't blaspheme.
Also when they finally responded to a looming class-action lawsuit for the Duffel kerfuffle, they made a website for the dissatisfied people to apply for, but it somehow unintentionally leaked their private info.
oblivion and fallout 3 is really when the change started. The shift from complex character skill systems, to a design philosophy with simplification as the focus. That was the biggest change imo. They still have this simplification mindset today.
I agree but i think the proper way of saying it:"they keep setting bar lower and lower". I dont actually think that when it comes to writing or combat the older games were any good, but it feels more like they are not even giving much of a crap anymore. Just because Starfield, Fallout 4 meets the quality of your average AAA game, that does not mean that the bar is highly placed, infact as i said i think its going lower and lower and features treated as in "we need this feature" as if it was a checkbox not as in "this feature is fundamental to the game and we will balance the game around it"
Simple minds can only make simple games, alas.
I find a hilarious that you think their downfall started with their best two games.
@@Spaceconstructs At what point did I use the word downfall? I used the word "change." If you have not played fo1, fo2, daggerfall, or morrowind, it will be difficult to see this major change in complexity, so make sure you play them. Otherwise, I'd say if you've played all their other games, and you still think fo3 and oblivion were the best.... i have no words.
Every game from Oblivion onwards removed neat and interesting features with no rhyme or reason.
Elder Scrolls classes, intricate quest chains, damage threshold, a coherent narrative, narrative player agency, magic schools etc etc
Morrowind was my first taste of the Elder Scrolls world.
After the intro sections, and you're let loose in the village of Seyda Neen, and the pop-up info window says, "you are on your own now. Good luck," I was like, "oh dayum. I AM alone, aren't I?" I remember being completely lost as to what to do next.
Then I went and k*lled a minor NPC, and began using his shack as a temporary base for storing all my stuff. XD That shack really helped me out, until I eventually moved to a larger city (forgot its name).
Morrowind was my last taste of the Elder Scrolls back when I used to be an adventurer funnily enough, when they ditched the spellcrafting I just never got around to picking up any of their games. Maybe it's because it took so long to fall to my price point for a mid Bethesda game, I only just picked up FO4 and FO76 a couple months ago when they were at $10.
Vivec ?
Did you give Fargot his ring back?
Balmora?
Vivec City? I lived in a free apartment there.
Morrowind was my first foray into the Elder Scrolls (and big RPGs), too, and I just fell in love with the game. As much as I love Oblivion and Skyrim, Morrowind just has that something-something that makes it a very special game experience.
As someone old enough to have played Morrowind when it first came out, that was probably Bethesda's creative peak. A few random comments. Every new release since Morrowind, has been "streamlined". And as a result, had lost some previous fans, while gaining more mass, mainstream, sales. That is the 20 year story of Bethesda in a nutshell. Why should they put huge efforts into leading edge, high quality stories and branching narratives, when the more casual each succesive game is, the more it sells?
You mentioned Radiant AI for Oblivion. As I recall, the main criticism of Morrowind at the time was that the world, particularly the NPCS were static. They stood around forever. So Radiant AI was hyped as every NPC leading their own life. That you could go on a quest in a cave, for example, and find some NPC had already dealt with the baddies. There were previews of NPCs behaving almost like humans in in MMO. But this basically made the game too random and a coherent story unplayable, so was gutted before release. Stripped back to basic schedules and no actual radiant AI as originally intended. Also, many people hated Oblivion gates. They liked the first one or two, but they got repetitive and you'd soon coudln't face them..see the pattern? Always keen to cut and paste and repeat assets in game. Oh, and many gamers absolutely hated the level scaling. It seemed put in as a cheap, quick alternative to setting sensible, manual scaling for the game. Was very controversial at the time. And others found the depth lacking after Morrowind. Being able to join all factions, even with contradictory aims, where in Morrowind you had to choose as joining one, would put you opposed to others.
I think perhaps the bugs are not the single biggest problem with bethesda. People focus on them as obvious and objective. For me, a bigger, core problem, is their desire to keep hyping up "HUGE" game worlds that end up being either empty, repetitive or both! Most games have significant bugs on release these days. They get fixed and then the game is fine. BSG problem is that even when the bugs are fixed, the repetition, shallow stories, the emptiness, the lack of genuine interaction etc is still there. Starfield really is not ruined by bugs - but it is boring because all the rest of those Beth negatives that have been festering for 20 years reached their peak in it.
When you put it all together, as you've done, and with the awful mobile phone games (I wasn't aware of those), it's obvious they are a company with minimal interest in games and lots of interesting in making money for the least work possible. And no, Starfield couldn't have been some huge team working for 10 years on it. It's clearly the minimum hack possible to put a cut and shunt of Fallout and Skyrim in space. And for a company that seems to love exploiting their market, it's jaw dropping how they appear to fail to understand what people loved about their games before. I do wonder if part of it is that we just grow out of the BSG formula as we age - and perhaps only return to it when we are old enough that senility hides the flaws :-)
Yep. Well said. 👏
Thank you for the good analysis.
IMHO the problem is, that nearly all big studios are on the stock market or owned by big corporations. So, it is not about gaming any more but about exploitation of an IP. Elder Scrolls is an IP, Fallout is an IP, Bethesda is an IP -- and people buy the products with these IPs even when they are bad -- so that makes those IPs interesting for the big players -- not the games, not the players or even delivering a good product.
100% agreed
Sweet baby inc is destroying these games too with propaganda
The writing is a shame-like a very average freshman college student.
@@anypercentdeathless The lead writer even talked openly about it, that he believes the players don't care about the story (and I guess writing). So it is no wonder. I would even be not so surprised if they used AI -- wait, that might even improve writing.
@@californianightmare1239They have absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay, which is absurdly dull in Starfield.
The most amazing thing is that every bethesda release has the SAME bugs for decades that have been solved by modders the day of release and then they just pop up again in the next game. Suck it, consumer: CONSUME
failout 4 literally has the same console commands as oblivion
even tho they don't exist in there you can be a memeber of a dark brotherhood
It's the same reskinned and recycled game, Starfield is just the recycled Oblivion ('planets' are basically Oblivion planes)
@@bdleo300 No one to blame but themselves for using a ancient engine for their "passion" project. All the Starfield hate is well deserved.
@@bdleo300Actually it's much worse than that. Oblivion gates had lots of enemies, unique structures, and sigil stones as rewards, plus there was a whole different world outside of them. With Starfield the worlds are empty, even the Factions and main quest line are just... boring, it lacks the same flair and Personality that Oblivion or even Skyrim had.
They refuse to change the engine because they know their games depend on mods being easy to make and fixing the game for them. It's a terrible idea for a game model.
To me Bethesda suffered because they gave in. Every new game they came out with after Morrowind became more dumbed down and more easy to digest for casuals. The moment you do that I think you’re diluting the pool already. The best games are products of unwavering artistic vision. Where people truly do not care to appeal to everyone and are okay having a dedicated fan base who enjoys their product for what it is
Yep everything after oblivion was cr*p , except New vegas and it wasn't even bethesda that made it
Oblivion was an oversimplification of Moroowind, made for any kids to play. Smash that button, follow the marker, never read anything, fast travel. @juliusfishman7222
Morrowind, aswell, was "simplified". In Daggerfall, you had Banks, you can buy horses, ships and houses (and not only five houses). You can ask for loans, you also had more skills (like swiming, crimbing and speech related skills to make some encounters, easy), the daedric gods, need to be summoner at some specific days, had multuple endings...
Of course, I can undestand that they cut some things, but, at the end of they day, they also simplified Morrowind (in that case, maybe for good, because Daggerfall, was a very clunky game btw)
@Amonny yeah but the missions had nice stories and it was immersive, but skyrim was a comete shiiishow after playing the mage guild mission completely it finally dawned on me this game isn't gonna give me the joy I had with oblivion. Every mission was a chore it was like the world was made to be just a game for low iq gamers
Bethesda, the homeopathic games studio.
I used to be an adventurer, and now as someone who actually likes Fallout 4 in the state it is now, I agree 100% with all your criticisms of the game. Indeed, the only reason I'm putting in so many hours even now is due to the Sim Settlements 2 mod, which not only vastly improves the settlement building minigame, but also incorporates the system into its own main story, which I feel fits in much better to Fallout 4's scavenging gameplay loop than the original's pithy 'save your kid' storyline. That said, I'm one of those people who actually _likes_ the settlement-building stuff, so I'm definitely biased.
Indeed, while I haven't played Starfield yet (I was going to wait for a GotY Edition, but not anymore though lol), I have got the sneaking suspicion that Bethesda actually expects modders to do the majority of the work. Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but all those empty planets and limited radiant encounters definitely make me think Bethesda expected modders to save their arses.
i like SSM as well, but that mod is far from perfect, like it's great in some areas of the mod where other areas of the mod could use a lot of work or simply scrap some ideas for others, like the whole building in the GNN, that system is so damn buggy and the script is most of the time unresponsive, i wish he would just scrap that system and make it less interactive on the player where it was optional having the player build, like pay some architect "NOT YOU" to do it, so all you have to do is pay the money to get it done like most skyrim mods handle things.
i do like that there is a skip option built into the mod because there are many times where this mod gets stuck and there is nothing the player can do to fix that section of the mod, but the issue with the skipping is that it will pass crucial sections of the story that make you mad that you missed out on simply because the quest decided to bug out for whatever reason.
i think i understand why he's separated his mod in sections because i'm experiencing this buggyness in his most up to date full mod SSM 2 chapter 3.
i feel like i need to just get the chapter 3 of the mod, but idk if it will have all the other stuff i don't like in the mod and i hope it has a quest skipper because it would be a drag having to build something when you really want to skip doing any of the building because it's hard to understand or the script lags or becomes unresponsive and makes you want to stop using the mod because of these issues.
i know his modding skills are good, and he has a lot of great potential in the scene, but some of the choices that he's made in the mod don't exactly fill me with a whole lot of hope in how it will get done, like there should be more choices in how things get done because as it is right not it's way too restrictive and forces the player to do things they don't want to do for various reasons, the mechanics he made for the general settlements is good, but inside that damn GNN building and some of the stuff you do with that salvidor NPC is some of the most painstakingly annoying and frustrating to deal with nonsense that should have other options to accomplish the goals, like the build menu in so many areas is just bad just poorly optimized and thought out.
i mean how is it that modders for skyrim found ways to make stuff like this far more simple but in FO4 everything has to be overly complicated to a halt where nothing gets done because of issues that exist in the base game are being utilized too much to the point where it's frustrating to deal with.
its not a good game and anyone who says otherwise deserves to be bethesda's paypig, but fallout 4 does hit a very under utilized genre that makes it worth playing; the scavenger game. there are so few of them that even a bad game can be pretty good.
@@comyuse9103
i know lately a lot of people have been shitting on FO4 for it's writing, but that wasn't my issue with the game in fact i found it was very well made for the story and the choices you can make and for the story, now i would agree it sucks that the story didn't allow you not to be the soul survivor so you can role play as someone else.
but the story as is isn't that bad to be honest, it provides many options to where the story goes and ends so you have multiple endings, starfield on the other hand from what i hear as i'm not playing that game any time soon, that game only offers the same outcome it's only different to which NPC it effects in the story, but otherwise it's very lackluster in choices and a lot of people don't really like the main story to begin with anyway, but it's strength's are only within the mechanics of the ship building and the adventures you embark on, but the load screen issues and the menu issues and how you can't really fly your ship outside that one small box in space and the exploration of the game it all feels stale, now i have seen enough gameplay videos of other people playing the game to understand what they are talking about and i would agree with them.
however i feel like bethesda can fix the game and the writing to a degree, i'm not saying it will be anything like NMS when it comes to traveling in your ship or the writing will be anything like cyberpunk or witcher, but some things i know they can fix because i already know the potential fixes this engine is capable of, story telling is something that can be fixed, they just have to hire a bunch of other writers to fix the current one and offer more options for the player.
i think it's a good thing bethesda is being attacked right now because these are things they have been brushing off for so long now that they have become complacent in their games and have slacked on many aspects of their games that they need to pay more attention to in order to grow and make better games in the future.
now they are expected to actually fix their game and that's what we expect as the players and if they want to continue making games for the future they better do a shit load better then they have been for this last decade, again, growing pains are good for a better product as this is where it will lead.
@@5226-p1e Fallout 4 is miles ahead of Starfield in terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, and it might be Bethesda's coolest game world to date. I love the scrapping/rebuilding aspect to it as well.
It's greatest flaw is the story. The whole "Sole Survivor" aspect is fine, it's arguably a neat hook into an otherwise well-trod setting. The problem was giving the player an unavoidable backstory and a child kidnapped before you even leave the vault. There was no need to further motivate the player beyond being the sole survivor of an effed up Vault-Tec experiment. Shaun's presence just creates an external imperative that forces the player to either speed-run the main story, or break immersion by choosing to not give a shit about your missing child.
Honestly, every BGS game is immediately followed by an alternate start mod where you actually do get to control your backstory and role, and I think a smart move would just be to do that going forward. It would require more work, but, uh, that's what the hundreds of millions of dollars is for.
@@jspotter89
i agree, and that's why mods such as the start me up mod are so great as it changes all that potential dialogue, now if only someone can fix the stupid nuka world quest to make it better to become a raider lol.
that was the most empty DLC i have ever played for a quest DLC in any bethesda game.
Starfield has cured my insomnia, its so boring that it puts me to sleep, when I go to bed all it takes is 5 mins of playing it and out I am, thats the best thing about it.
Such a shame, it made No Man’s Sky seem a lot better. Hopefully they can learn from the NMS experience and make some changes. Bethesda games should be about wandering around in investigating the world for hidden goodies, Starfield kind of failed at that.
You can also achieve the same results playing Age of Empires 2.
Or any ubishit title
you simply can NOT talk about mistakes of Todd Howard and his studio, without emphasizing the UI. and how it just keeps getting worse, no matter how many times anyone complains
and even worse is how the devs talk baout what ui mods they use, like. its a fucking parody at this point, theyre so supud and entitled they blatantly show they expect the community to fix their games instead of actually making a good ui themselves
I hear this said so many times. I play a lot of games and I think it always boils down to people will put up with terrible UI if people say the game is good.
FromSoft UI is ... quite bad. But it gets a 10/10. New Vegas used the same UI as Fo3 and COULD have changed it if they wanted to... But people still blame Bethesda somehow and say New Vegas is perfect. I'm not white knighting Bethesda but the bias is clear to see.
@@BasicWorldbuilder um, you miss the point. UI being atrocious doesn't kill the game, but it does NOT cease to be atrocious if the game is good.
@@512TheWolf512what they are trying to say is that if starfield was good, youd rarely talk about the ui. If the game is good, you wouldn’t talk about one or two things bad more than the 100 other things that is good. BG3 is a good example.
@@sweetbabyrayso5262 wrong. i complain about D0GSH1T UI all the time, even in the games i like, no matter how good the gameplay is.
Bethesda made a space game where you walk around every planet. WALK. Yes, let's go explore that planet... ON FOOT.
I remember a lot of Xbox fans calling Sony games walking simulators when starfield came out. They really weren’t thinking much
at least you can get your steps in once it releases on VR.
Because vehicles just not work in Bethesda games... even horses are bugged most of the time....
Until you hit an invisible wall and/or a loading screen lol
@@bdleo300Are space ships not vehicles?
Modern Obsidian is a far cry from the studio that made New Vegas. Most of the key devs left years ago.
Agreed. People place too much importance and stock in developers as a conglomerate and the brand they front. In practice, companies are only as strong as their employees and when all the mega valuable ones leave the company for greener pastures... sorry to say, folks, but that dev isn't who you think it is any more. May as well give them a completely new name because that's basically what it is - a team of completely different people than the ones who know how to make the games we used to love.
Yeah not sure why people keep hyping them up Outer worlds was adverage and Avowed looks sub par.
Their first Terminator game in 1990/1 was almost an immersive sim, you were in the role of protector or assassin and you had to navigate and use LA to win. You could break the law or not. Have shootouts with the cops, drive cars, some of them manual gears, steal from shops, use hospitals, rob banks. Then they just went the straight FPS route with Rampage/Future Shock and Skynet. But they did have Arena out when those came along.
I used to be an adventurer like you but then Fallout 76 and Starfield hit me in the head and waked me up.
God i wish i was still dreaming Bethesda used to be great and awesome not anymore nothing last's forever it seems unfortunately.
Honestly i'm done with Bethesda and their shitty and broken games period.
Other than that a great video keep up the great work👍
And greetings from the Netherlands🇳🇱
Hello 🇳🇱
Crazy, I played the sh*t out of Oblivion and never even realized there was horses.
I’ve played the sh*t out of fo4 and never realized there were different radio stations. 😂
That's truly crazy! My overriding memory of Oblivion was after I had escaped the dungeons and walked out into the daylight one of the first things I saw was a soldier on a horse who walked past looking at me suspiciously.
Don't you get a free horse when you meet Martin?
@@San_Vito Maybe?
Oblivion really was the first sign of what was to come, microtransactions, breaking older systems that gave people the ability to make insanely powerful characters if they knew what they were doing, discarding RPG systems in favor of simpler ones or nothing at all, and so on.
It got away with that however, mostly because despite all those problems, it was still a pretty fun game.
Obsidian is no longer the Obsidian we knew. They all left...
Don't give them Fallout.
Thank you! I'm glad there is someone else who gets it.
Fallout 4 would have been a much better game if the raider gang factions were in the initial release so you could choose them over the minutemen, and you could do things like raid and enslave the initiative etc. However by the time Nuka World came out I was just playing to grab those last few achievements, it was a good expansion but it came way too late.
You can't save a game with mechanics when the writing is abysmal and over simplified.
I used to be an adventurer like you, but then I realized that the decline of Bethesda really started with Morrowind. Because despite Morrowind being a fantastic game it's the first game to start simplifying and taking away roleplaying elements and scope rather than adding to them. Although my ideal Elder Scrolls VI would be one with Morrowind's strange and complex world, Oblivion's side quest writing and roleplay mechanics and Skyrim's very well-refined exploration and perks system.
Good video, by the way. I enjoyed it. Although I wish the ending had done more of a high-level recap.
the perk system and character progression in skyrim was barebones and pointless 😒
You can't call a hand crafted world a simplification. Is what Dagerfall never had.
@@Amonny Yeah, I wouldn't call it a simplification, it's more of a side evolution really. Just going down a different route
Most of the people at Obsidian who worked on New Vegas left a long time ago. Giving Fallout back to them doesn't mean we'll get a game as good as New Vegas. Likely it would be the same quality as Outer Worlds.
Sadly this is true, old gaming devs leaving is big sadge
@@DJSLANKMANbig sad you mean?
@@jhonayo4887it's twitch chat lingo, just means sad but in a cool and young way 😅 ...
oddly enough, i do believe that starfield is basically a sequel to outer worlds considering how similarly mediocre both games are lol.
The fact I hear troglodytes say "GiVe FaLLoUt To ObSiDiOn" shows you how dumb they are.
I haven't even given Starfield a try and probably never will. I'm more interested in finding a way to try out Morrowind. But it's hard to find the time anymore. You see, I used to be an adventurer like you until I became overburdened with responsibility. And took an arrow in the knee 😂
Morrowind is less time consuming than Skyrim imo you can get a lot done in a short amount of time
Cool, thanks guys. I will look into it 🙂
@@Wally480Morrowind isn’t as big or as long as Oblivion or Skyrim. There’s a lot to do, but it’s more manageable
I used to be an adventurer, so I won't torture you with a long essay. This video popped up in my suggestions, and judging by the merits of this video alone I'm happy to say I've discovered another great content creator. Easy sub!
We all saw the leather jacket, but only Nakey Jakey SAW the leather jacket.
Skyrim was probably the first time I experienced a game breaking bug, even if it never crashed my game
Even to this day I’m still wary when I start the Forsworn conspiracy quest even though it’s been years since it got patched
Ive always had a bad opinion of Markarth because of it
For me there were two instances. I met up with Delphine and esbern while they were fighting forsworn and they would attack me and wouldn't stop. Another one was that the whole map was hostile towards me and when I put my weapon away they'd stop them immediately attack again for some reason and I couldn't even go to jail (neither time did I commit a crime nor attack them)
now the game has a random chance of "hey you you finally awake" in literal black void
OR the carts get glitched on something and don't move
OR you can't physically make it to helgen because for you the gate is closed and you can't go through it
a random chance
but that shit can hapen very rarely on vanilla
I used to he an adventurer
- Todds Leather Jacket
I used to be an adventurer like you. But then I played Elden Ring instead.
The decline in my opinion started with Oblivion which was watered down from Morrowind, and even more so in Skyrim. In fact the only thing that made Skyrim good was the mods.
apparently obsidian has asked Bethesda a couple times about a New Vegas sequel but have been rejected multiple times
I'd heard that Obsidian wanted to make an Elder Scrolls spinoff. Bethesda obviously doesn't want to get one-upped again.
Obsidian like BGS has also turned to crap.
@@Ronuk1996everything is crap these days. No reason to live anymore
Hardly surprising, they're probably still salty that everyone prefers New Vegas over any of their games. 😂
@@lukew6725 only elitist snobs prefer that boring game and they have to talk about it everywhere
I really liked Daggerfall. I only just started playing it. If i had to make a choice between Daggerfall and Morrowind, it would definitely be Daggerfall.
The Systems were better and more detailed. I love how you could make a really strong character from the start if you focused on no more than 2 combat skills. I also love how you could control how fast to level up in the difficultly balance system. If you level up fast, the game will in turn be harder and vise versa. I also loved the way you could chose the battle pacing of the NPCs and the economy and political simulation was clearly suprior as well.
If ES6 combine 2 games from the series, it should be Daggerfall and Skyrim along with the new machanics they make. If you combine the simulation of Skyrim and Daggerfall together, along with Daggerfall Character Creation (as far as skills, attributes, advantages and disadvantages) on CE2, that would be amazing.
ES also should go back to the dice roll system (from Daggerfall).
My understanding is that a lot Morrowind was made with a "get it done" mentality. Apparently Bethesda was pressured to get it done quick, so there was a mentality of doing just "good enough". The problem is this turned into a trend with every game since then getting worse and worse. Oblivion even had a couple of loading screens that lied to the player, by talking about content that never made it into the game.
The conclusion is very eloquent and so applicable to many popular media franchises. Call of Duty, Halo, Battlefield, Destiny, Pokémon, Disney, Marvel, Star Wars.
Morrowind was clearly their peak. The only thing Bethesda added to their games since then was voice-acting; everything else was streamlined, for better or for worse, until we got no NPCs in Fallout 76 and minimal fun (with some shipbuilding) in Starfield.
For a lot of younger gamers, it may be hard to see just how staggeringly unprofessional and downright infantile Corporate (Gaming Companies Especially) behavior has become.
As a GenX'er born in 1970, my parents & grandparents would probably just flat out refuse to believe we'd reach the point we have. Going even into the early Oughts, 'talking back' to your customer, saying things like, 'Who are YOU to criticize our car? You just drive them, you don't know how to MAKE them.' would be seen as not just unprofessional, but actually unHINGED.
Videogame Companies are almost certainly the worst of the lot. Going back to the 'Mass Effect 3' debacle (now 12 years ago), it was the same. 'You think our product is broken and provide reasons why? Well... just shut up you entitled Basement-Dwelling Manbaby!' It's been so bad over the last decade it's likely the rule rather than the exception.
'Used to be an Adventurer?' I still am! ^_^
Customer service no longer exists or barely exists.
It's pretty sad and quite infuriating now adays how Bethesda has fallen
There is a noticeable cycle of having massive ambitions for their game, putting too many eggs in their basket, and ending up at the end of the year with a buggy mess that is not even half of the scope. That void which Bethesda time and time again creates for their Games in the form of bugs and mechanics that don't even work, eventually gets filled by modders, then you get to a point where everyone says "that game is bare bones without at least 100 mods."
Well I think the thing is, you need to rate their games compared to others. Bethesda always pushes the limits (until Starfield) and its eyes are bigger than their bellies so to speak. People bitch and whine about them, but used to light years ahead of others. I love Fallout more than any other game, and I know some people bitch about it, but the fact is, for less than a hundred bucks I’ve had thousands of hours playing it, and I can’t wait for Fallout London which looks like it’s going to be amazing!
People like to make jokes about Skyrim having 17 re-releases. But the only reason it re-released that many times is cuz people kept buying it. That's just how good of a game Skyrim is. Unfortunately, I don't know if I have the same hope for elder scrolls 6 anymore.
A very good and quite sad video. Starfield isn't awful, but it is painfully average, takes so many misteps and now IMO means its now been 12 years since they made a great game.
Honestly, I believe bethesda could manage to gaslight people into believing their games are good for the next ten years if their games started running like butter and improved performance.
I wonder what the future holds for BGS. Will they change things up due to the negative reception Starfield got, or will they look at their sale numbers and just continue doing what they were? Despite all the issues starfield has it still has pretty die hard fans, so who knows. One thing I do know, subscribing to Mugthief was a good decision, and if it wasn't for starfield I wouldn't have found this channel.
They continued to dumb their games down in a variety of ways for a long time now, they keep employing Emil even though the actual writing in stories has been not good, in fact i would argue it was never a strong point of BGS to begin with just like with the combat... All that is to say they have a very long history of not wanting to change for the better. Why would they change now? As long there are people keep saying "starfield's combat is good/fun" even though its extremely basic and indicative of how they have not actually played any fun FPSs like Cyberpunk ( purely talking about combat here ), despite claiming the game to be a disappointment, that is still overlooking issues, Bethesda will get away with selling under the umbrella of "bethesda"
The problem is people still keep flocking to "its not a bad game just mediocre". But how is that a good argument? How many AAA games actually get dubbed "bad", people need to realize that mediocre writing, bad stealth, low roleplay value, extremely simple and limiting combat in actuality means bad even if that meets your "average AAA game" experience. The bar has been set so low, that its okay to release a completely mediocre game with no redeeming qualities.
@@AngRyGohan I agree. My experience with starfield was mediocrity, and honestly that's worse than it being a bad game. Mediocre games get forgotten, the market is over saturated with mediocre games. One thing did become apparent, BGS no longer wants to make games for rpg fans. Their games are meant for casual gamers, which is fine. It's just not for me.
@@aersla1731 The problem with being completely for casual gamers whose bar for a "good game" is much lower is that the rest of us gets left in a dust, which actually effects us contrary to what they will say. I'm looking at a game like Hades that feels like a AAA game ( with how much voice acting there is especially that high quality ), yet there seems to be no demand for a AAA roguelike.
It makes you wonder about the possibilities that could be made for a cRPG with an actual AAA budget, but all we hear about how "DnD/Pathfinder/etc" cannot be even remotely implemented even though you have plenty of previous examples of actual massive branching choices for games ( pathfinder wotr, some missions for Larian games or even witcher 2 ) already exist. I'm not saying its actually possible to replicate, but It cannot be even remotely implemented because they care not to even try to the slightest and we are left with choices of illusion and a very few niche interactions at best in AAA games at least.
I think it will be a long time before i enjoy another new AAA open world game ( that wants to imitate an RPG in someway, not counting Elden Ring here ) after Cyberpunk. After Starfield's and Hogwarts's Legacy's success i will evade more AAA games than ever, even if that means i have to evade Dreadwolf.
@@AngRyGohan Well said, but the AAA space has always catered to the biggest demographic. There will always be outliers like what you mentioned, even then I don't expect good rpgs from the AAA space anymore. We have independent studios that do great work, and once in a while we get a banger AAA game.
I think they are going to continue the way they have been going because they care more about sales than anything .
They hit their prime with Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout3 & Skyrim. It was all downhill after that.
Nah, it all kicked off with Daggerfall which was a truly epic adventure. Arena was ok but too flat lol
It went sideways when Bethesda announced Starfield as if it were the game of the century- without the game to back up the hype.
What you mean they have lost the plot long before starfield
@@jhonayo4887 That's it. It should have begun with leaving earth and put us in the colony wars. The Constellation plotline could have come later where you'd be a war vet and a civilian contractor and the NG+ should have been strange and weird beyond just the Lodge. And of course with aliens and vehicles!
@@thorssensgamesNCC1701 yeah the fact there's no Aliens in the game(huminoids) to be exact made that game so unappealing.
@@jhonayo4887 Bethesda has ben going downhill so much. Multiple non-human humanoid races in Skyrim, but none in Starfield.
I won't lie im so over being "the chosen one" for any plot line in video games. Give me a living breathing world I can be a part of and live in. Not "you were chosen bc xyz..."
Bethesda never understood Fallout at all. People always cite " Fallout 4 sold Millions!!" and i dont care, sales numbers dont count for sh*t when it comes to having a QUALITY product. Black Isle Studios/INterplay were and StiLL are the original creators of Fallout. Pete Hines... mr." We're not beholden to something written Twenty years ago", " Lore is for nerds shut the F up and play our games". He should have never been the head of Public Relations. And Emil needs to be fired for all the bad writing he was allowed to get away with. I will tear him a new one every time i see his face online.
I only trust the real life ppl i know personally who tell me they like Fo4 and thats no one. Or its a "decent" at best comment. But somehow the internet has these FO4 die hards but where are they in my actual life?
@@Guinn-ish If I couldn't mod Fallout 4 I would not play it all. Due to mods I have over 2500 hrs. I think the same goes for Skyrim even. I don't like a lot of BGS vanilla mechs as they tend to make their games annoying, frustrating, or non-fun.
For me the end arrived with Skyrim but I only Saw it with Fallout 4. Now Let me explain, I deeply appreciate how they moved from the "Pen and Paper" Isometric system of FO1 and FO2 to a 3D A-RPG in FO3 and I realize that the radiant System in Skyrim, for the time, was a big step foward but I noticed how they were leaning to much in the "go where you want" side of their philosophy design than the "play as you want" side.
I distencly remember being disappointed in how simplistic was the main quest in skyrim, especially in respect to oblivion's (It wasn't as well written as Morrowin's final quest, but I enjoyed it).In Oblivion you invade the Gardern where the head honco of the Dawn is hidden, kill him and then assist Martin who then turns into a dragon and stop the final invasion. In Skyrim, You capture a dragon, ride it and then bash the head of alduin. It was disappointing, especially considering how I enjoyed some side quests even more than the main quest and how the expansions (IMO) were lackluster and plain. But I simply thought that It was me the problem, that maybe I needed some respite from Videogame RPG.
Then I brought last year FO4 (I had exams and choose to focus my time on the TTRPG side and play less videogames) and I was disappointed in everyway possible. I hated all companions execpt Nick Valentine. I hated the Crafting System, the dumbed down Perk system and most of all I hated how empty it felt.
BGS make big worlds as an ocean but deep as a puddle. The NPC where indepent from the player but they were so hollow that maybe having them standing around was better.
I think that their mistake was focusing on the size and not the content and showing in the Radiant System which is a great piece of software but it doesn't mean you need it for everything.
Sorry for the wall of text, Also Exclude FO New Vegas from this consideration since I love it.
the thing is, give it some time, you will realise you don't "hate " any of it , rather you are disapointed in the waste of potential
which hurt so much more than just shallow hate
They literally peaked at morrowind, anyone who didn't realise that once oblivion came out just didn't get it.
The novel quality writing sans-shitty voice acting made the world way more detailed, nuanced and mature.
Actual dice rolls and RPG elements, making your character actually unique rather than a jack of all trades.
You had to actually work up the ranks of factions (and required skills) and they had branching paths that made sense in the world.
The just threw in the towel and stopped trying with future games. The most generic, bare bones drivel with bog standard high fantasy tropes.
Gaming also all turned to shit during the longest, most stagnate, gaming period we had ever with the ps3/360 generation holding back both hardware and software technology for years.
Starfield is what happens when complacency and self congratulation is paramount. I used to be an adventurer.
Emil doesn't listen to feedback, he admitted it himself. He also explained why their games started to focus more on building stuff and less on story telling.
I used to be an adventure until a glitch took my knee into the ceiling. The video was right on the money with how I felt with modern bethesda games after the honeymoon period.
Bethesda: I think it’s time we went our separate ways.
~
“I used to be an adventurer.”
before the horse armor happened, Capcom in 2005 had an alternate solution that had its own drawback in the G rank releases. there were rereleases of the Monster Hunter games that included essentially a post game rank. where in base game you had low and high rank where monsters would get stronger and your geer would also improve if made again with the higher rank monster materials. until Monster Hunter World's Icebborne expansion, the first of these to be available as both a classic bundled or ultimate release and as a download for players that had the base game so you didn't have to buy the game twice at full price for like a little over a game and a half rather than starting off their added content as just a horse cosmetic.
yep, there is very good reason that the more cultured people against Bethesda give them the meme name of Bugthesda. both Skyrim and Fallout 4 had bugs where the scripted prologue just froze so you couldn't start the game. i played Fallout 4 years after all the dlc was out and still ran into that bug where you can't get out of the cryo pod. the pattern is simple, make a glitchy template of a game, let the modders fix it, and reuse their assets without paying them... or prevent a lawsuit later by creativing a program where they get payed if Bugthesda gets control and a cut of profits on formerly free content.
My main account was banned for having duped ammo. Made an alt account, bought fallout 1st for a year because it was cheaper. Played for a few more months and quit. Was figuring out which email I used for Disney + so I could cancel it and saw a receipt for fallout 1st and realized I’ve been charged every year by them for 4 years. I canceled it a long time ago, but it’s still auto-renewing…
I used to be an adventurer ....
I never really played any bethesda game, tried some for a bit, didn't appeal to me, move on. I understood that the game could be great for someone who likes it and never care more about them.
But yeah i gotta say since 76 and all the marketing and communications ... huh... quirks, i didn't even try to look at starfield when it released. And tbf, i wasn't at all surprised when soon after release i saw videos harshly criticizing it in my YT feed. Since then i started to watch a few videos talking about past bethesda game and eventually led me here : nice video. As i said, i never played the games, but your oppinion seems fair about the strength and issues the games have, and i enjoyed watching it.
Oblivion isn't Bethesda's last great game it is just their last real RPG.
Its funny to live in an era where AAA games are so bad that you can predict their mistakes before they even launch, how bizzare this world we live in is
18:20 Wont ever happen but is a neat idea: Obsidian " earned" the Fallout franchise after NewVegas. Just like " Blackbox" earned the NfS franchise in the 2000´s and released banger fater banger. But to this day BGS doesnt even want to recognize that the best Fallout game wasnt developed by them :)
Starfield didnt have alot of bugs for me, but after 30h I had to uninstall it due to the loading screens and the lackluster content.
After Starfield iam playing modded NewVegas again and I can see how the unique structure would have benefited modern BGS games so well. But the writing also plays a big parts and with Emil on the front I dont see a bright future for BGS.
“I used to be an adventurer….”
BTW, great video.
The worst Bethesda bug I ever encountered was the dragons flying backwards in Skyrim. If memory serves correct it was after a patch to fix some other bug and made the game rather unplayable because the dragons would also NOT LAND.
Bugthesda is the 1/2 creator and the one to blame Of today's gaming standard and what to expect for every single new gaming release: release now (an unfinished, broken, often unplayable product), fix later (and monetize as much as possible with it).
The other 1/2 is the gamers/buyers/consumers accepting it as normal paying full price for a defective product KNOWING that it is/will be broken and defective.
🤷🏻♂️
Thank you, finally someone that isn't biast and just speaks truth
my prediction is that elderscrolls 6 may verywell be their last game.
I freaking hope so.
I'm more frightened than excited.
Let's put it this way. Bethesda keeps changing things with Skyrim so that I periodically have to troubleshoot to make it work (particularly with the unstated new requirement to start a Bethesda account and manually activate your NON-Creation Club mods through Bethesda---and the game still crashes to desktop). I can't be bothered to do multiple troubleshooting days together for a game, so what did I do? I went back to Morrowind, which I play ever 5 years or so anyway, and I know I can count on it to run.
Obsidian is creatively/morally owed as many shots at their original IP as they’d like
There is an alternate reality where Bethesda didn’t outbid them for fallout and actually put the work in to make their own new ip
Yeah and its star field..the actual "new vegas in space"
I thought Fallout was an IP created by Black Isle, which disappeared in 2003.
I'd say sure if it was the Obsidian that made FNV, but all those people have long since left. Obsidian today is The Outer Worlds which is hot garbage.
I use to be an adventurer, then I took a Starfield to the knee.
Shareholders must be stripped of any kind of agency in what the company does. It made a lot of sense originally since they are co-owners of the company. But now their influence is too often purely negative.
No mention of level scaling in oblivion? Probably the most broken part of that game.
'Legendary Gamebryo'...
Legends say they use it without any changes to this day XD
"It reached a boiling point with starfield"..? No, the boiling point was fallout 4, 76 was the point where the pot was left without water and burned down the stove, and starfield is the point that people kept ignoring it somehow and now the entire house is on fire
20:26 is this Dror Ragzlin? Ruling like in BG3
I wanted SF to be good.. badly. Played around 40 hours and two things killed me: bugs and loading screens. It’s 2024 and you have a LS when entering a shop? Wow. And the bugs.. ish.
Stop trying to speed run a rpg
Bugs? Say what you want about the game but it's their least buggy and most stable release. I kept getting CTDs in F3/Skyrim, never had any in F4/Starfield. Loading screens... yes... when you enter a shop and there's nothing there but a counter with an NPC behind it and NOTHING ELSE then why...? Just why???
Starfield really feels like Bethesda tried to make Kingdom Come: Deliverance but using the tried and proven false engine they've been using for 20 years instead of some modern counterpart or something, therefore giving all the jank of Skyrim to the oddly open world of an actual exploration RPG.
Kcd is a gem of a game. Wish it was more popular among the rpg community.
It took me a few tries to finally get into it. Now I like it but if you'd asked me on launch, no way.
i despise kcd and i have no idea how you can even compare these two games lol.
I remember when I used to adventure like Bethesda of yesteryear. Now I don't even know if I'm excited for ES6 anymore :(
Oblivion is my favorite of the series, and where I definitely feel the hit the sweet spot for rpg depth. Skyrim is just missing too much. Without attributes and classes, every character is essentially the same. Everyone can be an all powerful, spell flinging, ultra sneaky, super strong murder hobo who crafts all the things.
In Oblivion, you could still get good at whatever you wanted, but if your attributes weren’t up for it, you wouldn’t be very good at it.
There’s no reason to make multiple characters, they are all just…..you. No roles to play.
Oblivion's level scaling coupled with broken leveling system ruined any RPG depth out of it. Classes are good if they're unique, not if they're just a combination of preffered attributes and skills that you choose in custom class anyway because vanilla game incentivizes you to not roleplay your intended role but to do complete opposite of roleplaying to level efficiently.
Skyrim's removal of classes is an example streamlining done kinda right, although I'd still prefer it if they fixed the core issue (level scaling) rather than removing RPG features. Skyrim is also poor when it comes to roleplaying systems but at least its leveling problems aren't as bad as Oblivion. You can also have deep RPG system without classes.
Horrible lore and story. Romans with magic imo.
I stopped messing with Bethesda when fallout 74 came out. Big fan of most the things they made before that.
Big decline. I have been playing there games for 23yrs
F76 is amazing at this point. Hell, even as of 2021. It is way better than any of the prior fallout games.
Obsidian are not good anymore. The outer worlds was a real piece of garbage.
In 2002 when morovind came out there was only 1 rpg game that could match it or even surpass it. Gothic and Gothic 2 night of the raven. Those 2 were on another level.
Remember, we got Starfield in 2007. It's called Mass Effect, and it's a whole lot better.
Their decline began after Daggerfall, each succeeding game was less ambitious than the last srspite having more resources and time. If you gave the people who made Daggerfall the resources and technologies of modern Bethesda, they wosuld have crafted the vision they had of a vivid world with total freedom to climb about and murder kings, then watch the fallout of that, that they wanted. Modern Bethesda has no passion, no ambition, no dreams, and that is why they fail.
The people who made new vegas dont work at obsidian anymore. If they make it now its gonna be a back 4 blood situation. Also outer worlds sucked
Yes, sadly
I used to be an adventurer...
I came for the BG3 content and stayed for everything else!
Honesty, I was so surprised how small your channel is compared to the quality of the videos and the essays. I am looking forward to see your channel grow bc you truly deserve it! You quickly became one of my fav gaming RUclipsrs (your voice is also very pleasent to listen to )
The quality of these videos...
Feels like you're at least at 500 000 subs.
Hope you get there soon!
Morrowind, the best Bethesda game! And Skyrim was a Bethesda's peak.
Well I remember playing Skyrim back in like 2012 thinking this game feels dated, old. I absolutely love that atmosphere of the game so I forgave the fact that it's simple. it's been a decade and there's been zero innovation. It's pathetic
"Please. Give Fallout to Obsidian." I agree and would take it one further. Give **Elder Scrolls** to Obsidian. I would love to see what they'd do with it and at this point I don't think Bethesda's main studio can be trusted with ES any longer.
Obsidian is dead...none of the OG devs work there anymore
Let me be clear, Bethesda is a shell of its former self. I loved Bethesda. Skyrim was my favorite game. Fallout 4 is the only one I have played, and it’s ok. I switched to Xbox to follow Bethesda. I have never cared about exclusives, but I had to get ES6, and looked forward to Starfield. The release of Starfield has shifted my perception of Bethesda. They killed my hopes for ES6 with that game, and how dated the RP felt. HUGE let down. Thanks Todd
Fetch my mug why? So you can steal it lmao 😂😂😂
Doug, plenty of people don't read the username. Don't ruin this for me!
@@Mugthief You're just salty because Bethesda never added a Mugthieving skill tree, aren't you?
@@Mugthieffair enough. But still loved the video and some of the others that you made. Keep up the good work my dude.
I used to be an adventurer like you, and then i got a diabeetus to the pancreas and had a foot amputated
Hey dude, just keep on providing us with great content 👍
I used to be an adventurer like you... and then Fallout 76 happened...
ah, a nearly hour long Mugthief video right when i finish my coffee? a good day
You just finished a coffee? make sure you've still got the mug
Elder Scrolls 6 is their last chance to right the ship. Starfield had some good concepts but it felt empty and unfinished
3:34 All the empty soda bottles in the background. Now that is the face of a true game dev.
We should make them sign a petition to give fallout back to Obsidian and if they deny that we rioting at bethesda headquarters WHOS WITH ME!!!✊️✊️✊️
Microsoft owns them both. So Bethesda has no say in it.
80s gamer here. Neither Morrowind or Oblivion impressed me. I enjoyed Skyrim and Fallout 4 (after modding the retarded "dialogue wheel". Fuck Mass Effect and fuck Dragon Age 2. Probably an even worse invention than quicktime events).
I started out with Ultima and SSI Goldbox. I have in recent times learned to appreciate Morrowind's worldbuilding, and I did appreciate its visuals at the time. But year 2000 when it came out, games like Fallout 2 and Baldur's Gate 2 had perfected dialogue-driven character-driven CRPG's, while Morrowind was... well... Wikipedia. Almost no memorable NPC's and no companions. It looked good. I give them that. And having finished the whole thing there are at least some NPC's in there, even if Morrowind felt like a weird hybrid between 3d engine and text-adventure.
Oblivion however, hit rock bottom. Potato faces I couldn't relate to. Most of the quests being humorous in nature. A dialogue system that amounted to "Rumors". A level system that was incredibly dumb. This was at the time we had games like Bloodlines, KOTOR, neverwinter nights, the Gothic trilogy etc. We had been spoonfed great rpg's for a decade, and Oblivion simply didn't even try to present interesting npc dialogue, or npc's for that matter.
When people was worried about Fallout 3 because it was "Oblivion with Guns", it was because compared to the very deep RPG's we had been fed with for over a decade, Oblivion was very shallow and dumbed down in almost every aspect beyond the nature engine.
Watch the newest Mass Effect completely blow Starfield out of the water
That's not exactly a high bar.
The new mass effect will be praised as long as its better than ME Androgynous : My Face Is Tired Edition, another historic failure.